Ogham Translator (Irish Ogham Alphabet)

How to use the Ogham translator

1. Type a name or a short phrase. Irish names work well, as do English ones. Accents such as á and í are read as plain vowels.
2. Choose a spelling. “By sound” handles ng, double letters and soft c. Pick the forfeda option if you want the later letters for ea, oi, ui, ia and ae.
3. Leave “feather marks” ticked to add the ᚛ and ᚜ signs that open and close Ogham text in manuscripts.
4. Press Convert and copy the result. Ogham was carved upwards along the edge of a standing stone, so turn it on its side when you design a carving.

How Ogham writing works

Ogham (Old Irish ogam) is an alphabet of strokes and notches cut along a central line. On stones the line was usually the edge of the stone itself, read from the bottom upwards. Each letter is one to five strokes placed to one side of the line, to the other side, straight across it, or as notches on it. That gives four groups of five letters, called aicmí (singular aicme), each named after its first letter.

The tool spells your text by sound:

• c and k → ᚉ (coll), q → ᚊ (ceirt), v and w → ᚃ (fearn, which first stood for a w sound), j and y → ᚔ (idad).
• ng → ᚍ (ngéadal) and z → ᚎ (straif). x is written ᚉᚄ, and p → ᚚ (peith), a late letter.
• Double letters are written once, as on the stones.
• Words are joined by the stem line itself. Unicode has a special Ogham space mark that draws the line with no strokes, and the tool uses it by default.

Brigid → b + r + i + g + i + d → ᚁ ᚏ ᚔ ᚌ ᚔ ᚇ → ᚛ᚁᚏᚔᚌᚔᚇ᚜

Ogham alphabet chart

Medieval Irish scholars linked many letter names to trees (beith, birch; dair, oak), and the alphabet is often called the “tree alphabet”. Linguists think only some of the names really are tree words. Several, such as uath and gort, probably meant “fear” and “field”.

Examples

Irish names

Aisling becomes ᚛ᚐᚔᚄᚂᚔᚍ᚜, with ng written as one letter. Saoirse becomes ᚛ᚄᚐᚑᚔᚏᚄᚓ᚜. With the forfeda option, the oi becomes the single letter ᚖ instead, giving ᚛ᚄᚐᚖᚏᚄᚓ᚜.

What real Ogham stones say

About 400 Ogham stones survive, most of them in southern Ireland, with others in Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Almost all of them are memorials made of personal names in a fixed formula: “X MAQI Y”, meaning “X son of Y”. MAQI is the early Irish form of mac. So “Finn mac Cumhaill” is the kind of text Ogham was really used for, and the tool writes “Finn Mac” as ᚛ᚃᚔᚅ ᚋᚐᚉ᚜.

Carving direction

The tool shows text left to right, the way medieval manuscripts wrote Ogham. If you are carving wood or stone, the traditional layout is vertical, starting at the bottom and reading up.

When Ogham was used

The oldest Ogham inscriptions are usually dated to the 4th to 6th centuries AD, written in Primitive Irish. Use continued in manuscripts long after the stones: the 14th-century Book of Ballymote contains the Ogham Tract (In Lebor Ogaim), which lists the letters and close to a hundred secret variants. Ogham is not a runic alphabet, even though it is often shown alongside runes. The two systems grew up separately, and Ogham was probably modelled on the Latin alphabet. Compare it with the Germanic rune rows in our Runic Translator.